23 Popular Photo Sharing Sites to Share Your Photos

If you’re about to upload your first photographs online or searching for a new photo sharing site which would fit perfectly for your portfolio, stay tuned! Today we’ll go an extra mile for you and explore the best photo sharing sites in the world.

We will make the criteria based on popularity, cost, and the amount of storage…etc. So let’s get going, shall we?

Photo Sharing Communities

1. Flickr

Flickr is one of the most popular and oldest photosharing sites in the world. When I started sharing my photos, I chose it not only because of its popularity but also because of its community aspects. Why? Well, once you upload your photograph, you can add this photo to a community group, such as conceptual photography, macro photography and so on. Flickr is different from other photo sharing websites due to their large community and the variety of skill levels within that community. Variety in skill levels within the Flickr community allows you to upload photos without being judged. If you are interested in creating your profile in Flickr, you’ll just need a Yahoo account to proceed since Flickr is owned by Yahoo.

Update: On April 2018 Flickr was bought by SmugMug.

After the acquisition, Flickr introduced new Pro accounts which will give you unlimited photo uploads and other features for $50 per year. Flicker’s new free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos soon. If you have an account with more than a thousand pictures, they will be deleted for good. If you recall, old Flickr offered 1TB of space for free users, so this new free package is a far cry from what it used to be

2. Instagram

Instagram is a household name due to the social aspects of this photo sharing site. Plus their filters allow anyone to instantly edit and make their photos better. According to the latest research in the field of social media, Instagram has stolen the hearts of many–700 million, to be precise. One way to utilize the power of this community is to use hashtags to get more exposure. Research shows that posts with at least one hashtag have 12.6% more engagement. The most popular hashtags on Instagram are #Love, #Instagood, #Me, #Cute, and #Follow. Instagram is a great place to edit, showcase, and share your photos with your friends or the world.

Instagram allows you to Find your inspiration easilyFollow your favorite photographer’s work on the world’s largest photography website, Instagram.com

3. PhotoBlog

PhotoBlog.com is a decade old photo blogging platform smartly designed to help photographers not only share their photos but also create amazing photo stories. If your lack of technical knowledge is holding you back from starting a blog, this is the right place for you to be. PhotoBlog takes only a few minutes to set up and you don’t need to worry about coding, widgets, or templates.

The biggest problem with blogging is finding an audience. PhotoBlog attempt to solve this issue by creating a social network for photobloggers. Unlike a standalone blog, your blog comes with an existing audience. Much like Instagram, you can like, follow, and comment on other blogs. It is definitely more fun to create stories from your photos than to just upload them somewhere!

PhotoBlog allows you to create a blog in a few minutes and start telling stories from your photos

4. 500px

500Px is a photo sharing site for your best photographs. It has been encouraging their members to upload their best work since 2009. It is a place where you can gain exposure, connect with other photographers or find inspiration. Unlike Flickr, where there’s a lot of photos from beginners, 500px emphasis on showcasing only the best photos. How does it work? Once you upload your photograph, it will have a 24 hours lifespan in order to gain popularity. The more likes and comments you get, the more popular your photo becomes. After 24 hours, if the photo has not gained enough popularity, it will be buried under thousands of other photos and has no chance of making it to the popular feed.

Update: 500px has discontinued their marketplace since this article was first published.

500px is home to many professional photographers

5. 1x.com

Unlike all the above websites mentioned, 1x.com is curated by a group of professionals. That means, after uploading your photograph, is going to be approved or disapproved by a group of professional photographers. It is said that only 5% of the submitted photographs will be published. Since there is a high reputation for the quality of images published, getting your photos on 1x.com can be good for your resume and also for your self-esteem. According to my own experience, not many photographers love this website but not because it’s bad, it’s because they’ve got rejected by the curators many times in the past.

All photos on 1x.com can be sold as prints. Profits from print sales will be split 50/50 between you and 1x. Other useful features of this platform include critique, tutorials, and right-click download prevention.

1X.com lets you test your skills and get curated by professionals

6. Canon’s Irista

Irista is a photo sharing site create by Canon. But you don’t need to own a Canon camera to use this website. It will help you to manage, store, and print all your images. Irista features a quick uploader for Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone.

Besides, there is a powerful album-creating and tagging system allows you to separate images. When you sing up for a free account, you get 15GB of free space.

If you need more space, upgrade to a premium account with 100GB for $2.25 a month. Different pricing plans even have up to 10TB of space which lets you storage about 150 hours of HD video.

Put together all images from all devices

7. Unsplash

Unsplash also deserves a spot on our list. It is a collection of beautiful images donated by professional and semi-professional photographers. All gathered and labeled for free use. This means you can copy, modify, distribute, and use the photos for free. When I first encountered this website I thought ’’Why would people give away their amazing photos for free?”. Then I realized photographers are attracted to the sheer number of downloads on this site. The hope is that this exposure might get them paid work or publicity. There’s a variety of websites similar to Unsplash that offer the same free photo service, such as Pixabayor FreeImages. Personally, I like Unsplash the most since it has more quality images and loads faster compared to others. In addition, even big players, such as Apple, use images downloaded from Unsplash in their campaigns.

Unsplash promise you exposure for your work

8. Exposure

Exposure helps talented photographers from all over the world to make photo stories or albums from their photos. It interactively showcases images so that it’s interesting to see and discover images.

Photo Portfolio sites

9. SmugMug

SmugMug was first introduced around 2002. It is designed to meet the portfolio needs of professional photographers who want customizability, presentation, and e-commerce. It is a great place to create an online gallery space for your professional photography business. If you are a professional photographer who wants to display your photos stylishly or wants a gallery site to sell your photos, SmugMug is worth a shot. Unlike competitor Zenfolio, SmugMug allows you to completely change the starting template. This is great if you are looking for a totally customized look for your gallery site.

If you upload photos at their full resolution to any site, chances are they will be optimized to reduce file size. However, SmugMug’s sharpening system works better than others. So if the image quality is important to you, you should give it a try. For selling print photos, Smugmug has a built-in e-commerce solution that allows you to choose from four fulfillment companies for filling your orders (Bay photo, EZ Prints…etc). Their shopping cart experience is well done and SmugMug gets points for making it very user-friendly.

SmugMug is a place to showcase a professional portfolio

10. Zenfolio

Zenfolio is an e-commerce platform for photographers to organize, display and sell images. There are lots of great features such as custom styles, Google Analytics integration, support for all color spaces, and great options for selling your photos. Furthermore, Zenfolio has the built-in capability to create blog posts from your photos. From the reviews we have seen, their users find the customer support reliable and helpful.

12. Behance

Behance is a free social network for creative professionals from different industries. This website is a place for self-promotion owned by Adobe. Many companies and buyers access the works of professional artists worldwide using Behance.

There is a section called Photography on Behance with the following categories: photography, retouching, and photojournalism. Behance has no limit to the number of projects to apply and amount of images you upload.

Artists collaborate on projects, share their creative work, and receive feedback. You can also use Behance to get inspired by works of other photographers. Behance is integrated into all Adobe software.

Photography section on the Behance platform

Photo Storage Sites

13. Google Photos

Google Photos is a photo storage service provided by Google. That means your photos have the same security and simplicity enjoyed by other Google services. Due to this simplicity, we recommend it for anyone from youngsters to curious seniors. Google has an excellent image recognition engine behind Google Photos. As a result, they can determine what is on your photos and label it accordingly. This means you can instantly search for your photos by just describing what you need to find. For example, if you have tons of photos and don’t know where’s your bikini photo from the last vacation, Google Photos can help. This service is also great if you take a ton of your photos using your Android device and wants to automatically backup all your photos for free. With Google’s reputation, this is probably one of the safest photography websites in the world.

Google photos allow you to create and share albums.

14. Apple iCloud

All Apple users are familiar with iCloud which connects with your iPhone and MacBook to store images in the cloud. Photos from your Camera Roll can be automatically saved in the iCloud as a backup. However, even Windows users can use basic options. You can store 5 Gb of photos for free. These photos can be viewed in a browser.

You can tag photos with names and locations to easily find them when you need. You can add collaborators to your account and allow others to upload photos as well. This is great if you want to share images from an event. If you have over 5GB images, you can upgrade the storage to 50GB for only $0.99 per month.

If you are an owner of Apple device, use iCloud to share and backup your images

15. Dropbox

Dropbox is a well-known cloud storage service. It lets you upload or sync your photos and other files to Dropbox, and get access to them in any place from any device, anytime. You can share specific files and folders, sync files to Dropbox, use it as a desktop app, and even add collaborators. You ‘ll get 2Gb of space with the Basic free account. As of 2018 December, their pro accounts start at $8.25 a month.

With Dropbox Showcase you can create beautiful presentations for your visual content and impress your viewers. Besides, you can adjust the layout, add captions and text blocks, and even track how much of your content is viewed.

Get access to your files on any device from any location

16. Cluster

Cluster is a perfect photo sharing website/app for groups. If you want to share images from events with your friends or deliver images after a photo session, this website is an excellent option for you. Every member of the group can download the original size photo on a computer or smartphone.

Its main advantage is privacy. You can invite people to your albums via email and no one else can see your photos. Cluster will be a solution for sharing photos from group events such as family gatherings, parties, or weddings.

An owner of an album can adjust permissions for file uploading, comments, and group members. You can sort photos by the time they were taken or the number of likes.

Cluster allows you to create a private group for sharing photos

17. Photobucket

PhotoBucket is a veteran photo storage site that has been around for many years. We mainly use this website as a storage service than a place to showcase talent. If you are looking for a way to automatically back up your photos from computer to the cloud, they have a desktop app that can do that. Besides photo storage and sharing options, PhotoBucket also offers their customers the ability to create merchandise (prints, cards, and stickers) with their photos. You can also share/upload your Photobucket photos to social media sites as well. their Pro plans start around $5 a month for 25GB.

PhotoBucket allows you to make your own merchandise using your photos

18. ImageShack

Check out ImageShack if you are looking for unlimited storage for your photos. It gives you 10GB per month for free. You can upload vast amounts of photos, organize them in albums and share with other people. It can be used, for example, by a photographer who needs to deliver pictures after a photo session.

The ImageShack’s interface is similar to Pinterest in some way. You can also add tags to your pictures so that you can find them later.

ImageShack allows 10 GB per month for free

19. Shutterfly

Shutterfly is a popular website to print your photos in different formats. You can create and print a photo album, wall print, postcards, calendars, photo book, gift card, canvas prints, and more with this website.

Along with all these printing features, Shutterfly is also a perfect place to store, share and organize an unlimited number of images. It offers you infinite storage space.

Print your images with ease and store your images with Shutterfly

Image Hosting Sites

20. imgur

With imgur, you can upload your photos and animated images (or Gifs) hassle-free in full-size resolution. It is an endless feed of pictures, Gifs, and memes from the internet. Anyone can sign up for imgur today and share an unlimited number of photos and images.

The maximum image size is 20M for still non-animated images and 200 MB for Gifs. The website is free to join. In a moment you can upload photos from your computer to imgur even without registration. You can upload pictures to imgur for sharing with the internet (Reddit, FB, or other sites).

Upload unlimited photos and Gifs and share them with social media sites

21. PostImage

PostImage claim to store your images for a lifetime which you can get even without registration. When you upload an image to the site, you can resize it. Moreover, you can make your photo expire after one day, a week, a month and it will be removed automatically after this period. This site is more for image storage and embedding on elsewhere (blogs, forusm…etc)

Lifetime image hosting for your blog or website

22. ImageVenue

You can upload your images up to 3 Mb in size to ImageVenue. The website is created for image hosting for bloggers, forums, and webmasters. You can even upload your images without registration (perhaps it explains the questionable content on this site). This is a great option if you want to host photos somewhere for embedding on other sites.

Image hosting for websites and forums

23. WeTransfer

WeTransfer which was founded in 2009 is one of the fastest ways to send photos and other big files to people all around the globe. You can send a file smaller than 2GB for free, or buy a premium account and share bigger files with anyone. In a premium account ($12/month), you are allowed to send up to 20GB files.

So, how it works? Everything is pretty simple: you need to go to WeTransfer.com, choose the file you want to send, add the email address of the recipient, and an optional message. And viola! As soon as the file uploads, the recipient will get a notification on email to download the file. In free accounts, the file dowload link will expire after 7 days.

Send our photos or any other files up to 2GB for free

What is your favorite photo sharing site?

We hope you found your photo sharing site among these 23 candidates. If you are still not sure which platform to use, we strongly encourage you to have a look at PhotoBlog.com platform. We have a great community and unlimited photo uploads!

Do you have a photo sharing site that you would like to add to this list? feel free to hit the comment button below and share your thoughts with us!